Technology Reviews and Podcasts

The Tech War Roundup – Q1 2017

Our favourite technology teams have traded blows in the last couple weeks. Let’s look at where the war for our hearts, minds, and most importantly our money, sits.

Team Red (AMD)

The Red Revolution has kicked it into high gear in the last few weeks. The great comeback into the high end CPU scene has arrived in the form of Ryzen, and it has been the talk of the town.

AMD’s new dreadnoughts of the CPU world, the Ryzen 7 series, have taken us all by storm with 8 cores, 16 threads and a very reasonable price point. The new flagship chip, the 1800X, has shown multi-tasking power competitive with Intel’s top of the line i7-6900K at roughly half the price.

AMD has positioned Ryzen 7 at a price point to make them the processor manufacturer of choice for content creators, streamers, and the like. The average gamer unfortunately must wait until AMD unveils the Ryzen 5 series.

Team Green (NVIDIA)

The Green Team has made two major announcements in recent days regarding their top of the line GPUs.

Despite AMD only teasing us with their new Vega architecture, NVIDIA appears to be getting ahead of the game with the announcement of their new flagship gaming card, the GTX 1080 Ti.

Coming in at a hefty MSRP of $700 USD, the 1080 Ti features an identical CUDA core count to the Pascal Titan X at 3584. It also features a 1.6GHz boost clock and a memory capacity of 11GB of GDDR5X VRAM. Early benchmarks show ~30% improvement over the GTX 1080, which is a massive leap.

Thankfully, NVIDIA also announced a price drop on the 1080, so look for cheaper 1080s in the immediate future.

Team Blue (Intel)

Seemingly in a preemptive strike against future AMD Ryzen gaming centric chips, Team Blue announced a “refresh” of their Kaby Lake lineup: the i7-7740K and i5-7640K. These two new chips feature a 112W TDP and improved clock speeds over the 7700K and 7600K.

While this improvement is only a minor one, it does set the bar slightly higher for AMD to match if they wish to tackle Intel in the high end single core performance market as they have in the professional market.

Intel also announced that their new 10nm architecture “Cannon Lake” will be shipping before the end of 2017, so we’ll stay tuned for that.

All in all, we’ve seen some exciting new PC tech so far in 2017. If you’re interested in further discussion and/or rambling on some of these topics, tune in to our technobabble podcast.